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An elderly German farmer who sowed bird seed hoping for a crop of sunflowers accidentally started his own cannabis plantation – and was mortified when police arrived to investigate.

The 74-year-old Bavarian opened the door to narcotics officers on Tuesday, who told him that they had come about the cannabis he was growing on the farm – neighbours had noticed the roughly 1,000, three-metre high plants covering the field and called the police.

They took the baffled farmer to the 300 square metre field in the Aschaffenburg area, and pointed out the huge crop of plants that the farmer had failed to recognise were cannabis, local paper the Express said on Wednesday.

The farmer said he had wanted sunflowers, and because he did not have any seeds, had scattered handfuls of bird food across the field and hoped for the best.

But as the bird food was a mix of sunflower and hemp seeds, the man never got his field full of flowers, but instead a vast stretch of leafy green plants he could not identify.

Once the impromptu botany lesson was over, he proceeded to climb in his tractor and destroy the hemp under the watchful eye of the police – who later said in a statement that the plants were not actually strong enough to give anyone a high.

"This kind of thing has never happened in the area before," a police spokesman told The Local. "He only wanted a few nice sunflowers."